Donald Trump is considering tapping former vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin as his secretary of Veterans Affairs, according to two Trump transition sources. Palin was an early endorser of Trump, throwing her support to him before the Iowa caucuses, making her one of his highest profile backers at the time. Among her chief competitors for the Veterans Affairs post, according to one transition source, is former Sen. Scott Brown, another relatively early Trump backer.

... there is emerging evidence that lengthy waits to get a doctor's appointment have become the norm in many parts of American medicine, particularly for general doctors but also for specialists. And that includes patients with private insurance as well as those with Medicaid or Medicare.

Merritt Hawkins, a physician staffing firm, found long waits last year when it polled five types of doctors' offices about several types of nonemergency appointments including heart checkups, visits for knee pain and routine gynecologic exams. The waits varied greatly by market and specialty.

For example, patients waited an average of 29 days nationally to see a dermatologist for a skin exam, 66 days to have a physical in Boston and 32 days for a heart evaluation by a cardiologist in Washington.

The Commonwealth Fund, a New York-based foundation that focuses on health care, compared wait times in the United States to those in 10 other countries last year. "We were smug and we had the impression that the United States had no wait times -- but it turns out that's not true," said Robin Osborn, a researcher for the foundation.

"It's the primary care where we're really behind, with many people waiting six days or more" to get an appointment when they were "sick or needed care."

The study found that 26 percent of 2,002 American adults surveyed said they waited six days or more for appointments, better only than Canada (33 percent) and Norway (28 percent), and much worse than in other countries with national health systems like the Netherlands (14 percent) or Britain (16 percent).

When it came to appointments with specialists, patients in Britain and Switzerland reported shorter waits than those in the United States, but the United States did rank better than the other eight countries.

So it turns out that America has its own waiting problem.

How the Koch Network Exploited the Veterans Affairs Crisis - From the beginning, the Koch brothers were exploiting troubles at VA hospitals to weaken Obamacare and attack Democrats.

Though the group doesn't disclose its donors, it has for a long while been clear the group is funded in part, or perhaps even in full, by the Koch brothers. Any remaining doubt can now be erased thanks to audio from the secretive Koch donor retreat this summer, obtained by The Undercurrent and reported here.

Hegseth addressed the crowd and not only confirmed that the Koch network "literally created" CVA but explained giddily "the central role that Concerned Veterans for America played in exposing and driving this crisis from the very beginning."

Most notably, during his roughly ten-minute speech, Hegseth outlined how the group was turning legitimate grievances over Veterans Affairs care into a political weapon to attack both the Obama administration and the idea of government-provided healthcare.

VA Scandal Driven by Koch-backed Group to Undermine Obamacareyoutu.be
[from 2:45 - 4:20 Hegseth admits the CVA and the wait scandal is BS]

"Clickbait websites are sites that take bits of true stories but insinuate and make up other details to sew fear. Most of these are conspiratorial in nature are very unreliable. Below are a list of these websites: